And We Have This Really Amazing Thing Here In New York City Where People Make You Your Food And A Little Man Brings It To Your Door

Yes, it’s a topic you might have seen before, but it never gets old to read how much of a cheapskate you are when you skimp on tips for the delivery guy, especially you, Mr. Upper East Side Doorman Building Dweller:

This first delivery of the dinner shift was more than a mile from the restaurant. Arriving, he surged off the bicycle, lashing it to a nearby pole with a heavy chain. A doorman stepped from the gleaming entrance of a prewar building on Park Avenue and pointed him to a side alley.

Mr. Lin hurried down a ramp, past trash bags and through a door into the basement. There, a building worker waited to take him up in a manually operated freight elevator. He exchanged few words with the customer, who handed over $15.50 and a $2 tip.

For two and a half miles of travel, round trip. On a brisk winter night.

“So-so,” [the delivery guy], 39, said of the amount before speeding off to the next delivery.

“C” Something, Say Something

Between grade inflation, improbable scores, restaurateurs ignoring dumb rules and now other restaurateurs apparently can have a letter grade changed without the fuss of a hearing. Perhaps the restaurant letter grade system is less useful than this administration’s Simplicists believed:

One of the city’s highest-end restaurants won’t have to post a dreaded “grade pending” sign next to its three-star Michelin rating thanks to a well-placed call to the Health Department.

Officials downgraded violations issued on Jan. 31 to Per Se, a big-bucks temple of the culinary arts in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, so that it could post the top sanitary grade of “A” even though an inspector slapped the eatery with a “B.”

One-Hundred Twenty-Three Thousand Five Hundred And Six Dollars In Tolls Is A Great Way To Measure An Addiction

Addiction makes you do some crazy things. The son who used his mother’s car to buy drugs, for example, never once paying a toll along the way:

The cash-strapped Port Authority slapped 20 habitual toll evaders with lawsuits yesterday, part of a new crackdown aimed at recouping millions in lost revenue from deadbeat motorists.

. . .

The list of the lead-footed drivers includes [. . .] a mother-and-son duo from Englewood, NJ.

[The son], 52, previously admitted to The Post that he used his 75-year-old mom’s Ford Focus for drug-buying missions into Manhattan.

During those trips, he racked up more than $120,000 in unpaid tolls and fees.

“When you’re addicted like that, you don’t think of the consequences. You have other things on your mind,” he told The Post.

He claims he is in recovery.

His mother, meanwhile, is furious she’s been hit with the hefty toll bill.

“If I could have killed him and gotten away with it, I would have,” said [the mother], a retired data processor.

Let’s tease this out: The toll for the George Washington Bridge — I’m assuming if he’s coming from Englewood, he’s using the GWB — is — and we’ll be conservative and use the peak number — $9.50. The exact figure, $123,506 (from this article), divided by $9.50, is . . . I actually don’t believe this number . . . 13,000. Now they only collect tolls heading eastbound into New York, so that is 13,000 trips to buy drugs. Yup, that sounds like an addiction to me.

Of course the moral of the story is to always buy local.

BID Head Calls Vendors With Odd-Smelling Food “Terrible Citizens”

The 34th Street Partnership takes on food carts and takes sides, coming out against “smelly” carts and in favor of upscale mobile vendors that sell stuff like Belgian waffles:

“The problem is really simple: the food vendors, with about five exceptions, are the ugliest collection of miserable-looking vehicles we’ve ever seen,” said Dan Biederman, who heads up both the Partnership and the Bryant Park Corporation.

“The vendors are almost exclusively terrible citizens, they litter with impunity and are generally rude to anyone who asks them to clean up.”

The campaign is still in its early stages, but the partnership has reached out to city officials, asking them to reduce the amount of street vendors in Midtown by taking away licenses and making sure that they’re in better locations.

Biederman said the problem has gotten particularly bad since many vendors started putting flashing signs on their carts. Food vendors often create excess smoke and odd smells, the organization said, and they leave their trash piled up on street corners.

The group also wants the remaining vendors to beautify their carts, using the few carts it finds attractive — including popular vendor Wafels and Dinges and the Fruit-n-Juice cart that’s typically around West 35th Street and Broadway — as a template.

The “terrible citizens” line is particularly unfortunate when read with the accompanying photo of a halal cart . . .

Of Course It Will Always Be A Front Row Ticket To The Best Show On Earth When The Entire Earth Is Your Jurisdiction

Well, if no one else in charge will speak up then it might as well be Chris Christie:

Christie also proceeded to critcize the NYPD in a way that would have been unimaginable for a major national Republican figure ten or even five years ago, post 9/11: “I hope that almost 11 years past 9/11, we are not going to go back to those days because no one is omniscient,” he said. “No one knows everything in this world in law enforcement.” And, he added, “This is the New York Police Department. I know they think their jurisdiction is the world. Their jurisdiction is New York City. My concern is this kind of obsession that the NYPD seems to have that they’re the masters of the universe.”